The effectiveness of cognitive lessons on helping students at BVU acquired the use of definite ‘the’ and generic ‘the’ by the testing adapted from Nguyen Thu (2005), Vietnamese learners mastering English articles.

Abstract

The English article system is not only so complex that philosophers and linguists have difficulties in agreeing on the underlying notions designated by the different forms, but also so different from the Vietnamese article system that it must be almost impossible for students recognize and remember the underlying its rules and conventions. Therefore, the author attempts to find out an effective way to teach English article, namely definite ‘the’ and generic ‘the’. To conduct this research, the author used a questionnaire to survey the meaning and use of English articles, a pretest to analyze the errors of using English articles before treatment, and a post-test to determine which group performs better (the control group or the experimental group) after treatment of 80 students at BVU. The paper compared the theories of traditional grammar and cognitive lessons insight cognitive grammar to experiment on the two groups.